Nancy Newman80 said:Culture shock and Gogol?! Some people just don't need that kind of show. She’s a force of nature who eats the stage alive. She jumps like Jagger, she's raw like Iggy Pop, and you can tell she's giving it 100%.
The thing is, about 98% of the crowd hadn't even heard her music before tonight; they just showed up because she's the actress Juliette Lewis. People often get annoyed when actors start singing or playing instruments. 🙄 Everyone has their biases, and now they think she's just "acting" on stage... well, yeah, a stage is a performance space, and everyone there is putting on a show, one way or another. If you just don't like the music, though, there's nothing you can do about it.
Hmm, true, the stage is a platform, but different artists interpret the obligation to put on a "show" differently. In raw rock, that theatricality is usually minimal, which is probably why people were so surprised. I agree that among the fans of The White Stripes @ The Viper Room, there are definitely snobs who listen specifically because she’s Juliette Lewis—it’s very similar to how some girls listen to U2 or Jamiroquai solely because the frontman is "cute," and if you replaced the singer with a skydiver with the exact same vocal range but an unattractive face, they’d lose interest instantly. That's where we stop talking about music and start talking about acting—not by the performer, but by the audience itself. That's what you call being a poser.
And it was obvious that most of yesterday's crowd was far from the garage-rock vibe. You could tell by how little people moved; the crowd had no intention of even causing a stir in the front rows, which is pretty much the default at a heavy concert like this. Instead, we just had fifteen meatheads in the front row who looked like they'd lose their minds if Juliette Lewis stepped within a foot of the monitors near the edge of the stage. No one understood the pauses either; they just clapped during the breaks as if the song had already ended. They're just music posers who came to break the monotony between pop hits and country songs, to impress a date, or just to see "that actress" sing.
I don't even know her catalog, and I was mostly curious to see how an actress handles a mic, but hey, David Hasselhoff sings too, so who cares? Not because he's some blonde idiot, but because his singing just sucks. Apparently, Juliette Lewis sings great raw rock, but to me, it's just raw rock without a single decent riff. I wrote that myself (if there actually *was* a riff, then the soundcheck was counterproductive), and that's the real catastrophe. As someone from the underground scene who's been in plenty of mosh pits, I was looking for energy, and the lack of a solid riff left me thirsty in the middle of a desert. Instead, all you see are sweaty idiots making no noise and one little girl giving it her absolute all, but ultimately, like someone else said, it's just style over substance.
Her jumping around like Iggy Pop doesn't change the fact that she could do the same thing with the mute button pressed on the mixing desk. Great visuals, terrible tone.
